


The Heel

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Circus, Gen, Mutant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-05
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:19:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt's been the star of the Munich Circus since he was a baby. Mort shows him there's more to the world than the flying trapeze.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heel

Kurt spends his kindergarten years in a glass box. Sometimes he watches the people who come to watch him. He smiles (and grins wider when they gasp, seeing his fangs). He blinks wide yellow eyes. He sticks out his tongue and wiggles his tail.

Mostly he plays with the toy cars his foster parents bought from a charity shop in Bonn and wonders what might be for dinner.

On his sixth birthday, when he stands on tiptoes to blow out candles, and looks just as delighted and overcome with utter joy as any other six year old has ever been in the entire history of birthday cake, the Boss looks him up and down and says: “Kurt, how would you like to be a performer?”

Kurt literally _bounces_ with happiness.

For the first few months it’s the ordinary stuff: juggling and tumbling, paired with a lot of menial things like mucking out the stables and cleaning up trash after the show. He works with Tobias, the mop-haired son of the lion tamer, and, after a lot of pleading, Kurt gets to be tutored with him too. He learns to read the garish picture books (A ist für Apfel) and then the Bible and that, apparently, is all the education a circus boy needs.

Kurt likes the circus. Sometimes he stands backstage and peers out at the crowds through a tiny gap in the curtain, looking for anyone who might look even a little like him. But they’re mostly pale-skinned, with blond or brown hair and five fingers on each hand. Even if he sees someone with darker skin, or more oval-shaped eyes, there’s never anyone who comes close to being blue. Or having a tail.

“You’re unique,” his foster father tells him, patting his shoulder. Tobias’ father tells him the same thing. Everyone is unique and special. Everyone has their own talent.

Kurt can’t help thinking he might just be a little more unique than everyone else.

When he’s eight, they start teaching him more advanced tricks: the high wire, the trapeze. Kurt takes to both much more easily than Tobias, or the few other kids who dare to try. His tail helps him to balance, and prehensile toes hold onto the trapeze much better than Tobias’ knees. After a while, they have to tell him to stop whooping with glee every time he sails effortlessly through the air, completely confident that he could never possibly fall.

“It’s not professional, Kurt,” the Boss tells him, gravely.

Kurt stubs a toe in the dirt of the ring, and promises to take things more seriously. At night he reads his Bible and wonders if Jesus might have been at home in the circus, too. If he had been here, changing water into wine, doing little tricks like that, people would have loved him. He wouldn’t have died.

He falls asleep, wondering if that’s blasphemy.

When he’s 14, they give him a show. It’s a five-minute piece while the adult performers change costumes and get a drink, and simple enough to do. The Boss says it’s inspired by Biblical themes, which is good. Kurt wears makeup, which is always fun, and an elaborate costume designed to hide his stranger features. Kurt doesn’t mind. Some of the women wear wigs, and of course the clowns look completely different in the ring than they do in real life.

He and Tobias perform amazing stunts while the ringmaster intones a morality tale. Look how beautiful Kurt is. Look how much better he is than Tobias. Wouldn’t you prefer him? Wouldn’t you take him into your hearts and homes?

And then the lights get darker and Kurt throws off his disguise. The audience gasps. “These are the devil’s works, ladies and gentlemen. These are his deceits and promises.”

So then good, pure Tobias vanquishes the Devil and sends him hurling to the safety nets below. Blackout.

Kurt is rather pleased with himself afterward. But as Tobias strolls out into the afternoon sunlight, each arm around the waist of a giggling teenage girl the Boss would probably describe as “buxom”, some feelings go through him that he can’t quite explain.

He decides he’s probably just hungry.

A year later, the circus travels by boat to England. They’ve been to Austria, the Netherlands, and France before, but Kurt is interested to see this entire country of new people. He sits, swathed in tentcloth, and studies a phrasebook that had probably come from yet another charity shop.

“Hello. It is nice to meet you. My nah-me… My _nayme_ is Kurt. How are you?”

He probably won’t get to talk to anyone, but it’s still fun to hear the unfamiliar words on his tongue.

If any of the boat’s crew wonder why a tent is talking to itself, no one asks.

He and Tobias perform their show. It’s become longer and more complex over the months, with showier twists and tumbles in midair, each of them looking as though they couldn’t possibly get to safety, but just managing it. The Boss had suggested they take away the safety net, and they’d both readily agreed. None of the adults use it, and they’re 15 now! Ready to take on the world.

The first show, somewhere outside London, is full of light and wonder. Kurt scans the crowd as he straps his tail to his back and brushes on his pale makeup. Everyone looks more or less like they had in Germany. Maybe different cheekbones. A few more redheads. A brown-skinned man with interesting hair Kurt would like to touch.

And then the performance.

It’s a little odd, performing to an English narration rather than the German, but Kurt pays attention. He does everything he’s supposed to, casting away his disguise to the expected gasps, reaching out to catch onto the trapeze at the very last instant…

But he’s still falling.

Kurt looks up, looks at the ropes no longer attached where they should be, and-

_BAMF_

He’s suddenly back on the platform, surrounded in black smoke that smells of sulphur, and the most confused he’s ever been in his life. If the stagehand hadn’t grabbed him, he would have tumbled off into thin air once again.

It’s the most impressive trick anyone in the audience has ever seen. They clap. They cheer. Kurt hurries down the ladder as fast as he can, longing to be on solid ground.

He doesn’t stay to watch the rest of the show. He finds his Bible and a quiet spot, and tries to grab onto something other than the idea that he had… what? He doesn’t even know the word for it. One moment he had been falling. The next he had been safe. Had he jumped? No, that’s impossible. But so is any other option. Maybe he’d just imagined it? But the broken trapeze had still been in his hands…

“Allo,” says someone at the entrance to the tent.

It’s almost as if he’s wearing Kurt’s disguise: trenchcoat, hat pulled low.

Kurt’s mind grasps for English. “Um. Nicht… Not here. Go there.” He points. Surely it must just be an audience member trying to find the bathroom.

The stranger only comes closer, taking off the hat. It’s with relief Kurt can see that it’s just a boy about his own age. Bad skin, but then most teenage boys have problems with that. In fact, he looks almost greenish, but that must be the…

Kurt squints in the lamplight.

The stranger grins. His teeth aren’t quite…

“Allo,” the strange boy repeats, sitting down crosslegged in front of Kurt. “You’re not in the programme.”

“ _Was?_ ”

The boy pulls the show programme from his pocket. “You. Not in ‘ere. Right?”

“Oh.” Kurt is not good at meeting new people. He clears his throat. “Hello. It is nice to meet you. My name is Kurt. How are you?”

The boy chuckles. “Right you are. Kurt.” He pronounces it with a short vowel. “I’m Mort.”

“Mort.” Kurt tries to imitate his accent, and takes the programme from him, leafing through the pages. There, in tiny writing, he finds his credit. “This is me.”

Mort squints. “The Incredible Nightcrawler?”

Kurt grins.

“Huh. Well, better than Toad, innit?”

“Toad? Was ist…?”

“C’mon, blue, I’ll show you.”

Kurt follows warily as Mort leads him a winding path past tents and shipping cartons, all the way to the chain-link fence surrounding the field. He’s never had a conversation with someone not from the circus before, and the Boss has warned him that outsiders will only want to hurt and kidnap him, using his gifts for bad things like crime or science.

But Mort is only about as big as he is, skinny under his coat, and Kurt is a circus boy. He can jump and climb out of almost anything. And then there’s that trick he’d managed to do earlier, whatever that had been. Maybe God is looking out for him, transporting him to safety on the wings of angels.

His impression of Mort changes dramatically when the other boy leaps over the fence in one bound. He blinks at Mort through the steel links. “Das ist… Trick, yes?”

“Yeah, smoke ‘n’ mirrors, innit?” Mort rolls his eyes. “Come on.”

Kurt climbs the fence quickly, jumping down the other side. “To where we are going, please?”

No answer is necessary. In thirty seconds they’re there – a grubby off-white camper van. Mort unlocks the door and switches on the interior light as Kurt ventures inside. It’s just like a miniature version of one of the circus caravans. Just a bit untidier, and with an overall ambiance reeking of fish and chips.

“You are in a circus also?” It would make sense: the athletic ability, the interest in Kurt’s billing, the strange appearance, the… It occurs to Kurt that, outside the circus, boys his age probably do not drive either.

“Naw, mate.” Mort slips off the coat. “College apprenticeship. Engineering. Well. Welding.”

Kurt has no idea what that means, so he nods.

He winds up nodding for a long time, because Mort just looks at him in the light, and keeps looking, and Kurt is too polite and too ill-versed in English to ask him to stop.

“You know what you are, right?”

“Entschuldigung?” Kurt thinks he understands the _words_ , but…

Mort reaches for a battered book, and opens it to show Kurt a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, letters, things that look like they should belong in university journals. “You’re this. We’re this. Mutants. Homo superior.”

The words mean very little to Kurt, but the pictures help him out a little: a young man giving a lecture, anatomical sketches, a blurry photograph of a man wearing an unusual helmet and a cape…

“Evolution,” Mort continues, and turns the page. Drawings of apes and men… It must just be a story. Kurt doesn’t remember it going that way in his Bible. But then again there hadn’t been boys with blue skin and pointed ears and a forked tail in the Garden of Eden either.

Mort glances at him. “There are more of us out there. Guys with incredible powers. We just have to find them.”

There are many people with amazing abilities just past the fence, Kurt wants to say, but he focuses on a name. “Professor Xavier?”

“Screw him. He’s the reason no one knows anything. We have to find _him_. Magneto. He’s going to set us all free. I’ve heard rumours he’s the one who stopped the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“Was?” Kurt is truly lost. Current affairs are hardly his thing.

“They say he’s German, like you. You’ve never heard of him?”

 _Magneto_. Mort is looking at him so hopefully that Kurt makes himself take a moment and think, but he knows what the answer will be. “No. I think not.”

Mort sighs. “Well, you can come with me. We’ll find him. They say he has a place for all the mutants who can’t fit in. All the ones with the wrong colour skin or big feet or too much hair. They say he’ll _make_ them listen. Not just hide us away in freakshows and circuses.”

“Aber… But I like the circus.” Kurt suddenly feels very, very young.

“The circus. You’re a _show_ , Kurt. Worse than that, you’re the heel.”

Kurt blinks. “The… heel?”

Mort taps the bottom of his boot. “The heel. The bad guy. The demon. Ready to get ground into the dirt.”

He might not understand all the words, but he understands “demon”. “Nein! Ich bin _nicht_ …” Kurt is on his feet, hot tears in his eyes. “I am chosen by God!”

“Yeah, maybe,” Mort says, squirming to get a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. “But not to mess around in a circus act, playing the Devil. The way you can move? You should be the hero. You should be in the Olympics and in Hollywood movies. But instead you’re here. The Incredible Nightcrawler? You know that’s a bug, right? And they tried to squish you tonight.”

“Squish?”

Mort thumps his foot down on the floor. “Squish. You would’ve been dead. Probably the golden boy cut your trapeze. They always do. Say they’re your friend and then try to kill you. Because we’re _better_ than them.”

Kurt sits back down heavily. “Mein Kopf…” he mutters, holding his head. It’s all too much. He should be safe in his bed, inside a ring of caravans, inside a fence. He’d snuggle under the covers with his Bible and everything would be safe and friendly again.

It would be… except for the broken trapeze, except for all the friends Tobias has, except for the niggling idea that maybe Mort is not just a stupid boy.

He sniffles as Mort lights his cigarette. Sometimes, when he’s half between wakefulness and dreams, he sees what he hopes is a memory: a woman singing him to sleep, as he’s wrapped in arms as blue as he is. The Boss and his foster father have always told him that his parents are dead, that there’s no one else like him in the entire world, just circus folk…

But here Mort is. And here’s Magneto, a German just like him. And the promise of more people who might be just like him too.

“Magneto will make them all understand?” he asks, hoping for reassurance.

Mort puts an arm around him, giving him a squeeze like a big brother might do. “Yeah, he will. They say his family was killed because they were different. Well we’re different too, but we’ll be the ones doing the killing.”

“Killing?” Kurt frowns. He’s not the expert here, not street-smart or even very well-versed in history, but… “No, that is a sin!”

“They tried to kill you, Kurt. Your _friends_. You think you can walk into town and walk out in one piece? We have to show them they should fear us. _That’s_ why God gave you your powers, right? You think he just wants you to do circus tricks? You, me, Magneto and the others – we can change the world.”

Mort makes tea with a tiny whistling kettle as Kurt stares at the scrapbook and thinks about how he never wanted to change the world. He would maybe just like them to cheer for him the way they do for Tobias. He would like golden-haired girls and boys to kiss his cheeks and tug on his clothes and tell him how wonderful he is.

But he looks at his hands and touches fingers to his jagged teeth, and knows that is never the way the story goes.

Kurt climbs back into the camp alone, with a scribbled English post box address tucked into his pocket. Now he has a friend, someone just like him, and a vague idea of what life might be like beyond the circus ring. Even if he’s not ready to take off from everything he’s ever known and seek out a man who might just be a fairytale, that tiny piece of paper makes him feel safe. It makes him feel like he belongs.

Tobias notices him as he wanders in, and invites him to come and have coffee and cake with a circle of them around the fire. There’s laughter and gossip and much discussion of what on earth had happened with Kurt and the trapeze. Kurt just shyly smiles and tells them he has no idea.

In the following days, though, as they tour England and Kurt brushes on makeup again and again, being vanquished by the forces of good again and again, he finds himself very often standing alone in fields, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, and wishing he were anywhere else in the world.

One day, much to his surprise-

 _BAMF_.

-he is.


End file.
